A display might provide information about a number of related elements to a user. For example, commonly used software development scenarios may combine different kind of relationships among elements, such as development objects. First of all, there may be dependencies among the objects. Secondly, the objects might be combined into one or more grouping levels to make the display and understanding of the elements achieve more manageable. By way of example, in Java there are methods that call other methods (and thus depend on them). Moreover, the methods may be bundled by classes that are aggregated into jars belonging to different development projects.
In many cases, the grouping of elements may occur as a result of logical organizational aspects that may not be particularly aligned with the technical basic dependencies among the grouped elements. One problem that arises is how to visualize and/or analyze the dependencies between the various grouping levels. Often, the structures and elements are not planned in advance, and must instead be manually aligned later on as a result of new requirements. It can be difficult to visualize the dependencies and consider “what-if” scenarios simulating structural re-organizations of the elements and groups. This may be particular true, for example, when there are hundreds of thousands of element and associated dependencies between them.
Accordingly, systems and methods to automatically and efficiently visualize element, groups, and/or dependencies may be provided in association with some embodiments described herein.